"Ahoy there! Hey! Hey you! You can't move that boat! I'm drawing it! Wait! WAIT!"
This happened twice during my two-hour sketching session with the Urban Sketchers Summer Crawl in Lymington (and no, I didn't really shout at the respective skippers to stop).
I'm new to Urban Sketchers - this was only the second meetup that I had ever been to. The spring and summer of 2023 have been a time of unforeseen setbacks for me (mainly due to a serious fracture to my right upper arm), but I had joined Winchester Urban Sketchers on Facebook, and finally came to a meetup for the first time on the last Wednesday of July. The weather has been against us in recent weeks - the wettest July since 2009 and all that. The day before the Lymington Summer Crawl saw torrential rain and rumbles of thunder, so, despite a more favourable forecast for this day, it took a fairly intrepid sketcher to venture out and brave the elements. I am not an intrepid sketcher, but I forced myself to go to Lymington. Come on, Alison, no excuses!
Urban Sketchers is proving an excellent discovery for me, for a number of reasons:
It gets me out of the house and seeing new places. As a self-employed artist working from home, it's all too easy to become very housebound and bogged down with chores. Where's the inspiration in that?
It gets me sketching! Obvious, I suppose, but something that, as an artist, I don't do enough of.
It's a great way to socialise and meet like-minded people. The local weekday meetups inevitably attract older people who are retired and available at that time, while a weekend event such as the Lymington Summer Crawl attracted a wider variety of ages and nationalities.
I have discovered that you have to work fast. At my first session, I was distracted by something extraordinary that happened (an astonishing coincidence, which I plan to make the subject of a separate blog) and I produced very little. I was a bit disappointed with myself, but learned from that failure. Now I know that I mustn't mess about, just get the lines down on the paper. I must quickly find something that inspires me to draw (that's usually not so difficult). I mustn't be over-ambitious and start a sketch that encompasses too much. Given the time constraint, I must focus on limited elements and make sure the sketch reads well, with enough contrast of dark and light areas. I watch other sketchers bring their drawings to life by adding watercolour, but I've yet to progress to that skill. So I have much to learn!
And on this Sunday I learned that a hazard of drawing a marina is that people turn up unexpectedly and move their boats! One of the dinghies in the foreground of my sketch was moved early on, causing some confusion amongst a couple of us who were sketching that particular view. All the other dinghies nearby start bobbing about and changing their position. Oh no! Then, about ten minutes before the end of the sketching session, the skipper turned up to reverse the speedboat I was drawing out of its berth. I took that as a clear signal for me to stop!
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